One sleepless summer night in 2017, researching for my dissertation on Twitter, I spotted a retweet from Joseph Gordon-Levitt — a team was crowdsourcing volunteers to help propose new emojis to Unicode.

I reached out. When they found out I was a designer, they offered me the role of illustrating the emojis themselves. I'd never touched Illustrator before — so I learned it overnight from YouTube tutorials.

Over one intense week, I illustrated four: 🧵 thread, 🧶 ball of yarn, 🧷 safety pin, and 🪡 sewing needle. Soon after launch, 🧵 became the universal symbol for multi-part posts (thread) on social media — still wild to me that something I illustrated at 3am during my uni days is now used by millions every day.